The Silence of Animals: Writing on the Edge of Anthropomorphism in Contemporary Chinese Literature

In traditional Chinese literature, animals talk and interact with humans once they have become spirits or were-animals and can move into and even beyond the human realm (e.g., the White Snake and the Monkey King). In the modern era, animals talk glibly in children’s stories and animated films, but they are mostly anthropomorphized cyphers deployed to act out human values and relationships. It is a mode of thinking with animals—attributing the human capacity for thinking and feeling to non-human species—that is unapologetically anthropocentric and leaves little room for thinking about animals in its alterity, biological as well as existential.   In the past decade, however, a new genre of writing has emerged that skirts anthropomorphism to reflect more critically and creatively on what it means to share a lifeworld with flesh and blood animals. Focusing on Li Kewei’s The Chinese Tiger, my paper considers how a new language has to be invented to tack between thinking about and thinking with animals. I argue that non-talking and yet fully intentional animals are a kind of transitional objects that mediate conceptions of humanity, and that endangered wildlife, as opposed to domestic pets, is a particular kind of transitional objects that Bonnie Honig calls “public things,” which enable attachment, community, and a vita activa.